TORONTO — This month is significant for Morris Polansky in two ways.

With Remembrance Day approaching on Nov. 11, the personable 91-year-old Canadian army veteran has been spending much of his time distributing poppies to Toronto schools and subway commuters. He is first vice-president and poppy campaign chair of the Royal Canadian Legion’s General Wingate Branch 256, its only Jewish branch.

“We want people to wear this poppy with pride, because this is the poppy that’s used to remember all those people who gave their lives for our country and for freedom,” he told The CJN.

As well, this month, Polansky is celebrating an adult bar mitzvah, reading a Haftorah for the first time. Growing up on a farm in Oxbow, Sask., about 180 miles from Regina, he had no formal Jewish education, nor did he have a bar mitzvah.

He and his brothers were the only Jewish children their age, although there were four other Jewish families in town. Polansky got along well with his non-Jewish peers, he said, but recalls antisemitism on the part of adults.

A retired electrical engineer, he said he could easily have become a farmer, but he disliked farming “with a vengeance.”

Polansky’s paternal grandparents immigrated from Ukraine in 1892, and homesteaded in Saskatchewan, where Polansky’s father grew up and became a farmer, too.

As a teenager during the Depression, Polansky would leave home in the summer to work in prairie harvest fields, threshing grain, milking cows and driving a team of horses.

In 1940, after finishing high school, he left f